This week saw the launch of a whole new kind of book, and guess what: it’s made out of paper and ink. I know, I know, crazy as hell and can’t possibly work, simply too modern and experimental, no way that the entrenched old media such as the Kindle and the iPad can possibly be threatened by something as flimsy and ephemeral as a solid object, but I’ve been sent one and I’m impressed.
It’s called a flipback book (at first I thought it was going to be one of those excellent flipbooks from when we were little, where you peel the pages really fast and see a stick man running along and jumping over things — or better still, if you made it yourself in the corners of your physics textbook, having sex with a cat) and how it works is that the spine runs along the top and the pages (reduced in size to the dimensions of a fag packet) hang down from it, so that you read by peeling the pages upwards like a flipchart, except not all the way over, so that you read downwards through the two horizontal pages, as if reading a single conventional vertical one.
They use incredibly thin paper — it reminds me of the almost transparent pages of a Victorian pocket poetry volume — so that a 900-page novel is no thicker than two thirds of an inch, and considerably lighter than a smartphone.
The idea has been swiped by Hodder & Stoughton from the Netherlands, where all the good ideas come from. And it really is up there in terms of lateral thinking and coolness with trams, bicycles, legalised ganja and free sex from the age of 12.
Unlike a normal paperback you really can carry a flipback in a trouser pocket and read it in one hand while in the bath, on the loo, cooking, walking, driving, smoking or operating heavy machinery. But unlike a smartphone it doesn’t also offer live porn so there is an outside chance that you will actually use it to read.
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I think it’s a lovely response from the traditional book to the threat from electronic media. It is almost as if the book itself had never been invented, and we had been reading on digital “tablets” for two thousand years, when suddenly some wiseacre comes along and says “no need for electricity or internet access — here’s a ‘book’ you can read anywhere! In strong sunlight, in the bath, on the Moon!” (In much the same way, my father used to say, as the man who invented spectacles would have been fêted in a world where people had been wearing contact lenses since the Middle Ages: “Look! You don’t even have to put them in your eye! They just hook over your ears!”) The flipback they sent me was a copy of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was handy not only because I had never read one of his novels before (not really being a genre fiction kind of guy and worrying that I’d have trouble following the plot of one of these so-called spy novels) but because there’s a new film of it coming out any minute that I shall want to be snobby about from the point of view of one who preferred the book.
And I’ve got to say, the meeting of form and function was perfect. Flipping surreptitiously with a wetted thumb through its shrunken pages in unwatched corners this week (of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, for example, in a couple of cabs, and at the in-laws’ house last Sunday afternoon) I felt a full affinity with its hero, George Smiley, wading through secret papers in his spy-like way.
Unlike George Smiley though, when I finally finished the book and laid it down, I had not the remotest clue what was supposed to have happened in it.
• Yes, I was at Wimbledon in the week, and I noticed that the only time Centre Court really came alive in a way different from when you’re watching on the telly was when, to a chorus of orgasmic gasps, a couple of enormous, desperate, outstretched, last-ditch lobs were sent up so high that they briefly cleared the sides of the stadium and the ball hung tiny and alone against the sky, in its high-viz coat, like a little moon, before falling to earth — the question of whether it would land in or out uniting the crowd in loud anticipation.
And I had a cunning idea (I’d had a couple of Pimmses): if lobs are so exciting, then the players — who are just dull functionaries after all and paid good money to entertain us — should be compelled to play more of them. And the way to work it is to say that every time they get to deuce, the next point has to be settled by a rally of lobs. Only lobs can be played and they have to be high enough that the ball clears the edges of the stadium and is clearly visible against the sky by everyone. Even the serve has to be a massive smashed lob into the air.
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It would be brilliant. Much better than boring old tennis.
• I had another idea. I just remembered it now. I was looking at the speeds of the serves and how they frequently got up over 130mph, which is way, way faster than any fast bowler has ever bowled a cricket ball (anything over 90mph is very rare in cricket, barely the pace of little Laura Robson’s second serve), and I got to wondering — because cricket is so much more exciting than tennis that I think about it even when I’m watching Andy Murray on Centre Court — whether any great batsman has ever faced a rocket service with a cricket bat.
I think The Times should bring it about. I’d want to see a batsman, Alastair Cook for the sake of argument, padded up on one side of the net, defending some stumps, and a great tennis player with a big serve, Andy Murray let’s say, serving at him, looking to hit the stumps. It would be fascinating. I don’t think he’d get through. I’m not saying it would be easy for Cooky to score runs, and he should probably avoid the temptation to hook, but he could leave an awful lot just on length, and for every straight driven half-volley back into the net he could score two, but if he clipped it to leg, then . . .
. . . Is anyone still listening?
• Here’s another thing. Tennis fans may all think they’re pretty marvellous, with their thousand-quid tickets and their strawberries and cream and their poxy Mexican waves and their visit from Kate and Wills and their laughing at the wacky antics of Andy Murray, hitting a ball through his own legs (crazy guy), but they haven’t got the first idea how to behave compared with football fans.
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I was sitting on the end of a row in the best seats in the house, and spent the whole day either swivelling or standing so that old chaps in blazers and rickety dears in floral dresses and sunhats could sidle past for yet another wee, and not once did I get so much as a “ta”. Not once. Smug, entitled, upper-crust, soulless, unsporting, no-idea-how-to-behave- in-a-crowd, fairweather, part-time enthusiasts the lot of them.
Football fans may sing “tits out for the lads”, “he’s only a poor little yiddo” and, “I’d rather be a **** than a ***”, but when they slide past you to go and get a pie or stab a copper they always, without fail, say “cheers, mate”.
I know which I prefer.